Day Six – Including Bonus Rant

Other than the Yalata Aboriginal Community, which had access restrictions because of Covid19, there isn’t a whole lot between Nullarbor Roadhouse and Nundroo. What there is, though, is quite beautiful. I had deliberately slept pretty late because I didn’t want to be riding into the morning sun (or more to the point I didn’t want the cars and trucks behind me driving into it), and then I accidentally had a very slow breakfast. It was a compromised breakfast, too.

The good news was that now that I was in SA I could suddenly get Farmers Union Iced Coffee. If you don’t understand what is so good about this then I can only feel sorry for you. If, on the other hand, you happen to be a representative of Farmers Union Iced Coffee then yes, I am looking for sponsorship, and yes, I am happy to accept same in the form of copious quantities of Farmers Union Iced Coffee. I had got myself a Farmers Union Iced Coffee from the fridge, and was waiting in line to order my food. As I waited, I heard a girl at the fridge call to the guy queuing behind me “they don’t have any Farmers Union.”

He replied, pointing to me, and saying “this bloke’s got one, are they in the other fridge?”

I felt a bit bad as I let them both know that I had taken the last one from the shelf, but he seemed good natured enough as he asked her to grab him something else instead. By this time I was at the front of the queue, and I happily ordered away, finishing my order by adding the last of the very good looking apple pies they had in the display counter. As I did, I heard a muttered “ah f#ck” from behind me. I turned to see the bloke looking crestfallen as he held an inferior iced coffee and watched the last apple pie being removed. “Were you gonna order that?”

“Yeah, but it’s ok, I can have…”

At that point his voice faded away, as he realised nothing else in the display looked even faintly appetising. I couldn’t do it. I left the apple pie for him, and got another sandwich instead.

I then went and sat to eat. It wasn’t as relaxing a breakfast as it should have been – even sitting in one of the most remote locations you can get a Farmers Union Iced Coffee, I was worrying about Covid19. Before deciding I would take part in IPWR this year, I had thought long and hard about Covid. The information back then wasn’t as clear as it is now, but it still sounded like as a young(ish) and healthy(ish) person I was almost certainly not at immediate personal risk, but I could still carry it and give it to others with a worse risk profile. Eventually, I made the decision to take part after hearing that everyone over 60 would be vaccinated by the end of March, and seeing reported incidences across the country at virtually zero. That meant that I had a very low risk of exposure to start with, and by the time I was reaching the higher population densities and seeing more people there would be some level of protection for the most vulnerable of those people. By the time I made it back home everyone over 60 should have had plenty of time for a vaccination to start taking effect. This particular morning though, I was thinking about my mum, who is (ever so slightly) over 60. A quick check told me that she had actually managed to get a vaccination appointment, but it was for May. Bugger.

Still, there was nothing I could do about it now, apart from keeping an eye on any Covid cases where I was, had been and was going, and the good news was that at the moment there weren’t any in any of those places, so I kept on riding.

The name Nullarbor is from the latin nullus arbor, which simply means no trees. It doesn’t mean no shrubs, no bushes, or no brush. So along the highway there’s actually plenty of vegetation, just most of it isn’t very tall. Apparently, the Nullarbor Plain is the world’s largest single piece of limestone, and over millions of years some of that limestone has been dissolved to create massive networks of caves, that break through to the surface occasionally through sinkholes. This forms what is called a ‘karst’ landscape, with the word ‘karst’ coming from the Slovenian word ‘kras’, which means bare, stony ground. So, we have a massive lump of limestone, with a surface of bare, stony, ground. On top of that bare, stony, ground, is a whole lot of low brush that has been twisted and sculpted by the wind, but, according to the theory, no trees. Clearly, the reason there are no trees is because there’s only a very thin layer of topsoil, so there isn’t anything for them to grow in.

That all sounds very good and scientific, but it doesn’t change the fact that there are trees on it. Being as pedantic as I am it was of course a source of ongoing entertainment to play ‘spot the tree’, with each win accompanied by a loud exclamation of “Nullarbor my arse!”. I’m sure it says bad things about me that this was so entertaining that I basically rode to Nundroo with only four stops, all of which were either to apply sunscreen, apply fly-spray (the sandflies were starting to put in an appearance, but I knew from experience that this was just the warm-up), take photos of trees just to prove that they had got it wrong, or a combination of the above.

Of course, the other thing that was achieved by focussing on the horizon and shouting exclamations of disdain and contempt at hypothetical early explorers was that it kept my eyes off the disgrace that is the roadside right next to the Eyre Highway. The roadside next to the highway is covered in rubbish. Mainly empty bottles and cans, because they are the things that take longest to break down while holding their shape and not getting buried, but also plenty of food wrappers and just general junk. It just makes me so disappointed. This rubbish doesn’t simply appear out of thin air, all of it is carried in, usually in cars or trucks, and could just as easily be carried back out again, but for a whole lot of people that is obviously too much effort, so the rubbish just goes out the window. It disappoints me and infuriates me, but the thing that makes it so much worse is my suspicion that a whole lot of the people who can’t be bothered not spreading their rubbish across the country would claim loudly and proudly to be patriots who love Australia. I’m sorry, but if you can’t be bothered disposing of your rubbish properly you aren’t a patriot, you’re just a selfish #@$!.

Anyway, it wasn’t long until I reached Nundroo. In 2018 I had a pretty reasonable meal in Nundroo Roadhouse along with Callum Henderson, before he disappeared ahead of me in a metaphorical cloud of dust. We also met the local paramedic, who gave some useful tips for dealing with a sore achilles tendon (not that either of us had one at the time, but it is advice I remember today and am almost positive I will use at some point) and turned out to be a dot watcher. Even then though I wasn’t in love with the place, and it remains my least favourite of the roadhouses between Norseman and Ceduna. It does have an ice-cream freezer though, so you better believe I stopped there anyway. There was still a bit of cloud around, and the day seemed to have maxed-out at 31 degrees. By the time I reached Nundroo it was down to around 22, but ice-cream was still in order. I have heard ultra-racing described as a mobile eating competition, and I certainly don’t disagree. Ice-cream is a ready source of carbohydrate along with a good amount of protein, in a format that helps keep your core temperature down. Much more importantly, it is delicious, and it’s rare for me to stop somewhere with a temperature above 20 degrees and not have at least one ice-cream.

There wasn’t a great deal more for me in Nundroo this particular day though, and I knew Penong was only 80km up the road so I didn’t hang around too long. I also knew that pretty soon I was going to take a left to be heading due east again, and that should mean the cross wind I had been struggling against through the day should become a glorious tailwind. Hopefully it would increase my speed enough to keep me ahead of the rain that the same wind was due to bring in about 2 or 3 hours. I got on my bike.

It’s only about 5km from Nundroo Roadhouse to the left turn, and it’s a proper turn, of the sort where you can actually see the road bend. That may not sound surprising, but there hadn’t been too many of them just lately, so it really stood out to me. The other thing that stood out was that just as that bend came into view, the wind changed. Suddenly it was much more of a headwind. I knew I was going to turn out of it shortly, but it meant that my longed-for tailwind would actually stay as an annoying cross wind. Ah well, hopefully it would slow down the rain a bit too!

I basically only stopped once on the way to Penong, and I’m pretty sure it was to answer a call of nature and add a bit more fly-spray, but other than that I kept my head down and pedalled. I could see the change around me though. There were more crossroads, more fences, more driveways. Starting just around Nundroo the population seems to pick up and the signs of people (with the exception of the litter, which is disappointingly constant) increase. This keeps up all the way to Penong, which is actually a proper town.

For quite a long way every place I had stopped had consisted of a roadhouse with maybe a caravan park and a few houses scattered around it, but not much else. Penong though has a roadhouse, a caravan park, a pub that isn’t part of the caravan park or the roadhouse, multiple streets, a school, an oval, a post office, a windmill museum (so the sign told me), at least one additional accommodation option, and a café. So many options!

I pulled in at the roadhouse. Penong Roadhouse is actually quite a fancy place, in the scale of roadhouses between Norseman and Ceduna. It’s got a big enough turn-over that you can get a ready-made salad out of the fridge and have it be fairly fresh and good, and it also has Voltaren Gel, which I had been seeking for a couple of days by that time. I rolled up, parked my bike where I had a good view of it and anyone approaching it, locked it up (I’ve seen a few questions lately about whether people take locks on races like this, and my answer is yes, absolutely – just a light one, but it should give me enough time to get to my bike before anyone can take it away, as long as my eyes never leave it, which they don’t) and headed inside.

By this time there was a light sort of drizzle falling. It hadn’t been enough to inspire me to put on my rain jacket, but as soon as I stopped pedalling I started feeling chilly and put my jacket on.

The guy in the roadhouse was very relaxed. I ordered a whole lot of food and sat inside to eat it all, and we chatted as I did so. It sometimes surprises me the reactions you get doing this sort of ride, and this guy was a good example. He didn’t look like he’d ridden a bike for a good 40 years, but showed absolutely no surprise at me rolling up in the dark and the wet, ordering three meals and sitting and eating them there and then. He didn’t ask where I’d come from, but did ask how the weather had been for me, so he’d obviously figured out that I’d been on the bike all day. And when I told him I was wondering if I should head on a bit further or just stop there for the night he replied that the storms were all in the north at the moment and they never came down from there, so I should have at least a couple of hours, so he had no illusions that I was stopping soon.

He asked how I liked the food, he asked how much water I could carry on the bike, he asked if I’d had any problems with wildlife, he asked who my favourite football team is (I think he was a Storm fan, and he certainly wasn’t planning to miss a word of the commentary on the game he was watching), but he never asked where I’d come from or where I was going to. I guess when you get down to it, he saw which direction I came from so there weren’t too many options for where I had come from, and he saw which direction the bike was pointed, so it was pretty obvious where I was headed, at least in the near future. I did like the attitude though. The other option of course is that he could have been a dot-watcher, might have seen the riders coming through the three previous editions, and might have known exactly where I had come from and where I was going.

I also checked my phone while I ate, and saw that Scotty had pulled out.

It’s a funny thing – there were ten of us signed up for the race, and the only one I had already met got hit by a car the week before and so he was in hospital rather than racing with us. That meant it was me and 8 other blokes, most of whom I had only spoken to for a couple of minutes as we rolled out of Fremantle, but we were keeping in contact as we went, and sharing the odd trial or tribulation. The rules of the original event said no outside assistance, but the fact is that there hasn’t been a race organiser for any subsequent event, which means that interpretation of and adherence to the rules are entirely up to the individual. It would have been quite possible for someone to have hitchhiked from Norseman to Ceduna and still claim that they won the IPWR, and without an organiser interpreting the rules, no-one could prove that they didn’t. I mean Rob, our 10^th rider who was at the time well and truly hospital bound, could have claimed his trip to the loo as a winning IPWR ride, and no-one could have proven it wasn’t. I do know though that neither of them would have been the winner of the IPWR that I was riding (although Rob would have been a lot closer, obviously).

All of that though is a long way of saying that everyone interprets the rules however they want. When it comes to outside assistance, and especially to helping fellow riders, there is plenty of interpretation. The fact is that riding from one side of Australia to the other is a big undertaking, and we all know it. When you are taking on something that big and there is someone else doing it at the same time you pretty quickly feel a common bond, and you pretty quickly get to the point where you want to see them do well. While you might not help them to get an advantage over you, it’s pretty natural to help them out of trouble if you think they need it. In 2018 Callum Henderson and I were pretty close for the first half of the race, and then I fell to pieces while he turned on the afterburners and rode away. There was another guy pretty close to us though. Now that other guy was riding according to his interpretation of the rules, and it turned out that his interpretation include multiple short-cuts. Callum and I had both noticed this by looking at the tracking page, and I wasn’t particularly delighted about it. I’m pretty sure Callum shared the same sentiment, but the fact is that although Callum had ridden more km from Fremantle, he and this other guy both reached the bottom of the “Back of Falls” climb together. If you don’t know it, this climb comes off the Omeo highway. You turn around the corner and are confronted with a wall of road. The first 400m is at well over 10% gradient, and if you’ve just ridden a couple of thousand km and are carrying everything you have used over that distance on your bike it looks quite intimidating. After that it flattens off a little, but remains at about 8-9% for the first 9km. That first corner is known as WTF corner, and there are some very polite people who will tell you that WTF stands for “Way To Falls”.

Anyway, my understanding is, Callum and this other fella reached that corner pretty much together, but Callum, who’s got a bit of go to him, managed to ride away and was out of sight halfway up the hill, when he heard a curse from back down the hill. He stopped (he’s not a bad bloke I guess, even though he beat me), and called out to check if the other fella was ok, but got no reply. So he turned around and rolled back down to check. As he was headed down the other fella came around the corner, still pedalling up. Callum turned around, rode back up what he had just rolled down, caught the other guy and asked what the yelling was about. Turns out the other guy was just unhappy about the climb. They both kept on with their respective rides and ending up pushing each other hard to get to the finish. You could review that race and apply your own interpretations of the rules if you want to figure out who won, although it’s pretty clear to me. That isn’t the point though – the point is that even as you are racing against someone you can want them firstly to be OK, and secondly to do well.

Now I wasn’t there, and from what I heard it sounded like Scotty actually made the right choice given the situation he was in, but he’d seemed like a nice bloke and it was sad to see him pull the pin, so I was already feeling a little disappointed about that as I finished eating and prepared to head out into the night.

The bloke from the roadhouse bade me a friendly farewell, ending with “be careful on those roads, there’s a lot of Indians driving trucks theses days”. Now I don’t make a point of checking the racial heritage of people I notice endangering my life while on the road, but given that the vast majority of those I can remember from before or since have appeared non-Indian, this was a pretty disappointing farewell. My energy was low though, so I replied with something to the effect that I don’t care where they’re from as long as they’re awake and watching the road, and stepped into the rain.

As I headed out, the rain had actually backed off a little and it was now a nice night to be riding. I kept my jacket on and my mood improved as I just cruised along, and around 70km later I came to the fruit inspection station outside Ceduna. Now I know this is a very long way from the state border, but I have to admit it feels like the border between the emptiness and the people. The fact that you actually get stopped at it helps with it feeling like more of a border too. A quick chat with the inspector to confirm I had no fresh fruit (oh, how I had been wishing I did…) and I mentioned I’d probably try and stay in a hotel, because it looked like it might rain soon. He took a look at the sky and said doubtfully that it might, maybe…

I rolled on to the roadhouse at the entry to town, started thinking about my dinner, and confidently asked for a room.

“Sorry, we’re full up”

“What, totally full?”

“Yep, totally full. You need to book a few days in advance at the moment.”

This was surprising. The last time I had passed through and asked if they had a spare room the response was that of course they did, they always did, so things had obviously changed. It was disappointing too, because despite the quarantine guy’s doubt about any rain I was pretty sure there would be a decent amount, so I really wanted to stop somewhere with a roof. It was around half past midnight. I got out my phone.

It doesn’t feel great ringing people at that time in the morning, but I figured if you run a hotel you should expect late night contacts, and if you don’t want them you should turn the volume down on the phone. Happily, Ceduna is big enough to have quite a few accommodation options. The first place I called just rang out – must have had the volume turned down. The second place went straight to the answering machine. The third place someone answered, and sounded annoyed at being woken. Well, they could have turned the volume down. But regardless, they had no room. I hesitated before calling the fourth place, then called it anyway. The guy had clearly been asleep.

“Would you have a room for tonight?” I was trying to sound like it was a normal time to be asking this question.

“What, now?” He sounded 90% asleep.

“Yes”

“Are you outside are you?” He only sounded about 75% asleep now.

“No, I’m about 10 minutes away.”

“Ahhhh, yeahhh, I’ll see you in 10 minutes.” Still sounded about 75% asleep. I wondered if I would turn up there and he would have fallen asleep again. But he clearly wanted my business enough that he hadn’t told me to bugger off. Also, though, I had said 10 minutes, and I needed to find the place and ride there, which would probably be at least 5 minutes, and I hadn’t yet done anything about food.

I needed to get some food quickly. This was by far the biggest roadhouse I’d seen for quite a while, and it basically had four flavours of takeaway chain all in the one shopfront. The last time I was at this roadhouse they had been cooking all night and had vacant rooms. This time, no rooms, and three and a half of the takeaway flavours were all packed up. I thought about asking if they could make me a subway, but that would clearly require getting everything out of the fridge and would probably take 15 minutes. I settled for a few baked goods, and three microwave meals from the fridge. It was quick, and it would see me through. Then I figured out where the motel was, packed my food to travel, and headed over.

I pulled into the driveway as the light came on in reception. I parked my bike up against the wall and headed on in. The bloke had his t-shirt on inside out, and he seemed to be moving at one-quarter speed and everything needed a pause for consideration before he could act. He was very obviously wishing he was in bed, but he was friendly enough, and offered me a choice of rooms at a choice of rates. I got the cheap room, because all I wanted was a shower and a bed, but then I paid him for the more expensive one because I had got him out of his bed at nearly 1 o’clock in the morning. He hesitated, and then said “yeah, right, thanks for that, it is pretty late!”

I rolled through the carpark and pulled in under the awning out the front of my room at around 12:54. At around 12:54 and 2 seconds, the heavens opened. It literally went from a few spitting drops of rain to a torrential downpour in an instant. And I watched it from under the awning, as I figured out which key opened the door. I was really glad I had made those phone calls!

Once I was in the room, I immediately regretted having taken the cheap one. It was a very nice room, don’t get me wrong (this was before one of the other riders found a dead rat under his bed at another location, but even without that comparison this room was fine), but it didn’t have a microwave. That made the collection of microwave meals I had grabbed seem much less appealing.

A quick check of the information booklet showed me that there were microwaves available in the breakfast area, open from (and my memory is pretty hazy here, but let’s call it…) 6am until 9pm, or just call reception for access outside those times. I thought about that bloke I had already dragged from his bed once tonight, and how visibly he had wanted to be asleep. I’m not that nice though, so I also thought about the absolutely torrential rain outside, and the fact that just getting to the breakfast room would see me getting totally and utterly soaked. It was enough to tip the balance. I grabbed a fork, opened the first cold microwave meal, and began to eat. I don’t recommend microwave meals from a service station at the best of times, and eating them cold does not improve them, but as I said earlier, when you come down to it ultra-racing is basically a mobile eating competition, so I ate. I told myself I’d make up for it with breakfast tomorrow.